Resources

Hashtags & activities

The fediverse is powered by hashtags, they bring visibility to toots, allowing them to travel across the different servers and increase visibility of content based on topics. Even if your server is small and quiet and you may not know who to follow in the beginning you can fill your home timeline by following the hashtags of your choice. This will help you find content you enjoy and people from all across the fediverse to follow, no matter what server they are on. You should also put hashtags in your toots so they, and you, are easier to find too.


Hashtags, especially ones in the creative areas, are often used to encourage people to join in with activities, maybe to draw, write or photograph something inspired by a prompt or topic, and to then share it online. The use of hashtags gives visibility to the activity, to share the instructions or topic, for you to share your creations on the theme, and for you to find other people doing the same activity as you.

Half the fun of joining in with a hashtag activity is the joy of looking through the timeline of the hashtag to find like-minded people, to know you are not doing something on your own, and to connect and interact with others by liking, boosting and making positive comments about what they have shared.

Here are some of our favourites, this list is not complete and new ones will be added as we find them.

Hashtags for any day of the week

Visual arts and crafts

  • Two general art hashtags you can use to share your art are #MastoArt and #FediArt.
  • #KleineKunstKlasse – This hashtag was created by a small German speaking creative community so they could share their creations and to co-ordinate group art activities. Many of the people who use this hashtag are German speakers, but they are happy to have creatives of different languages join them. For more information ask Kitty, who you can contact here.

Writing

  • Some general hashtags for your writing and poetry include #Haiku, #Writing, #AmWriting and #WritingCommunity.
  • #DailyHaikuPrompt – a hashtag activity created by the Mastodon account Daily Haiku Prompt. Daily Haiku Prompt gives daily prompts and people share their haikus with the hashtag. For more information click here.
  • #MastoPrompt – a hashtag activity created by Steve Cudahy. He provides a daily prompt and people share their writing with the hashtag. For more information click here.
  • #WordWeavers – a hashtag activity created by Alina Leonova and Branwen OShea. There's a daily question about writing and people share their answers using the hashtag. For more information you can contact Alina here
  • and Branwen here.

Music

  • #Musodon – Music artists share the music they have created.
  • #BandcampFriday – is used by both musicians to help promote their music on Bandcamp Friday and by people who buy music from Bandcamp on Bandcamp Friday.

Crafts

  • General hashtags you can use to share your creations and activities include #Woodworking, #Carving, #Knitting, #crochet and #Amigurumi.

Hashtags for photography and photography activities

  • Some general hashtags for sharing your photos include #Mosstodon, #Defaidodon, #Insects, #LichenSubscribe, #BirdPhotography, #BloomScrolling, #Schmetterling, #Wildlife and #NatureCommunity.
  • #FotoMontag – A weekly hashtag used on Mondays to help people practice and improve their photography. For more info click here.
  • #FotoVorschlag – A daily prompt to share one of your photos that you have taken. For the daily prompt and more info click here.
  • #52WochenFotoChallenge – For the weekly photography prompt and more info click here.

Hashtags for specific days of the week

Mondays

  • #Mondog – share your dog photos and drawings
  • #MarkupMonday – share your photos that you have added extra details to, aka markup
  • #MushroomMonday – share your photos and drawings of mushrooms

Tuesdays

  • #OneHourOnePhoto - Kitty posts a photo on Tuesdays and people have all week to draw/paint/create something based on it and share with the hashtag
  • #TigerTuesday – share your drawings and paintings of tigers
  • #ThickTrunkTuesday – share your photos and drawings of trees
  • #MardiPatisserie – share your photos and drawings of cakes

Wednesdays

  • #WIPWednesday – share your artistic work that is in progress
  • #MeerMittwoch – share your photos and drawings of the sea
  • #WaterfallWednesday – share your photos and drawings of waterfalls

Thursdays

  • #Fursday – share your photos or drawings of dogs
  • #ThrowbackThursday – share your photos of something from the past

Fridays

  • #FungiFriday – share your photos and drawings of mushrooms and fungi
  • #FensterFreitag – share your photos of interesting and beautiful windows

Saturdays

  • #InsektenSamstag – share your photos and drawings of insects
  • #StatuenSamstag – share your photos of statues that celebrate everyday people, activities or creatures
  • #Caturday – share your photos and drawings of cats

Sundays

  • #SilentSunday – share your photos of nature without people and without words in the toot. Ovbiously, please use words in the alt texts of the photos.
  • #StandingStoneSunday – share your photos of standing stones


Hashtags, especially ones in the creative areas, are often used to encourage people to join in with activities, maybe to draw, write or photograph something inspired by a prompt or topic, and to then share it online. The use of hashtags gives visibility to the activity, to share the instructions or topic, for you to share your creations on the theme, and for you to find other people doing the same activity as you.

Half the fun of joining in with a hashtag activity is the joy of looking through the timeline of the hashtag to find like-minded people, to know you are not doing something on your own, and to connect and interact with others by liking, boosting and making positive comments about what they have shared.

Mastodon tips

Finding your feet on Mastodon and the fediverse


As with any social media platform there are new words and concepts to learn to be able to talk about the different actions and features.

mastoart.social is a server, also called an instance, that uses Mastodon.

Mastodon is the name of of the software used to run the server and is one of the many different types of software that is used on the fediverse.

The fediverse is the name given to the network of connected servers and where members from different servers can talk to each other even if they use different software.

Finding your way around the fediverse as an artist can be difficult at first. However, like other platforms, there is one thing in common: you sign up, connect with people, start posting and pick up everything else as you go along.

For those who would like some guidance, here's some of our favorite tips!

Getting started and visibility

The first priority is getting your posts and art seen. By default, your public posts are displayed on the local timeline of your server. To make them visible to users on other servers as well, we recommend using hashtags.

Some common ones are: #MastoArt, #FediArt, #Art, #Photography, #VideoEditing, #Animation, #Musician, #MusicProduction, #AmWriting, #WritingCommunity, #GameDev or #IndieDev.

There is no algorithm to automatically promote posts or content on the fediverse, the other main way to get posts travelling and visibility is by interacting with other people.

The three most common interactions with posts are liking, boosting and commenting on posts. Normally if you like, boost and comment on other's posts they will interact with you and possibly boost your posts in return.

Boosting is really important for visibility as it sends a post to the timeline of all the followers of the person who boosted it, and this instantly sends posts to many different servers.

How to find people and populate your home feed

Another priority is having interesting content in your feed and people to build a community with. On mastoart.social there are five types of feed that you can look at:

  • Your home timeline is the posts and contents of the accounts and hashtags you follow. On Mastodon you can follow hashtags as if they are accounts and the public posts with those hashtags will appear in your home timeline. If your home timeline is too quiet for you then you might need to follow more people and hashtags.
  • The local timeline or server timeline is found by clicking on the world icon and selecting "This server". You can see all the public toots from all the members of your server in chronological order.
  • The global timeline is found by clicking on the globe icon and selecting "Other servers". It is where you can see all the public toots that your server is aware of. If someone is following an account from any server, then their public toots will appear in chronological order here.
  • The server trending pages is found by clicking on the compass icon and also includes the explore function. Here you can see the posts that are popular on your server for that day, this feed is not chronological, it is ordered by the most popular posts first. There is also a section where you can see the ten most popular hashtags on your server and the news links that are popular on your server.
  • Hashtag feeds are found by clicking on a hashtag. This is where you can see all public posts with that hashtag from your local server and all remote servers it is aware of. From here, you can also click "Follow hashtag" if you want all the public posts with that hashtag to appear in your home timeline.

Where you can get help/answers to your questions

If you are a member of mastoart.social you can talk to us, Sciasm and Kitty. We are the admins of mastoart.social and you can contact us via our accounts on Mastodon.

We also have a joint admin account which is named @artmin and we use it to share important and useful information about the server, Mastodon and the fediverse.

We are happy to help and answer questions about the server, Mastodon and the fediverse. We were new on the fediverse once too and we like to help people settle in and to have a good experience on the fediverse.


As with any social media platform there are new words and concepts to learn to be able to talk about the different actions and features.

mastoart.social is a server, also called an instance, that uses Mastodon.

Mastodon is the name of of the software used to run the server and is one of the many different types of software that is used on the fediverse.

The fediverse is the name given to the network of connected servers and where members from different servers can talk to each other even if they use different software.

Frequently asked questions

What is an alt text and why should you be adding it to your images?

An alt text is the text description that is attached to an image. This includes photos, drawings, diagrams and memes. The main function of an alt text is to describe what is in the image for a person who has no or low vision and cannot see it. People who are blind or have low vision often use screen readers, this is a tool that reads out loud what is on the screen.


Ideally you should include an alt text for every image you post on the fediverse, however, there may be reasons why that is not manageable such as dyslexia or various physical conditions. In these situations people can ask the community to help them add an alt text by adding the hashtag #Alt4Me and someone who sees it will reply to your post with the hashtag #Alt4You and give you an alt text that you can then edit into your original post.

There is a lot of debate on what is and isn't a good alt text, the most important thing is to try to add a description for the image. It gets easier with practice. Three general pointers to start with are:

  1. Keep it simple and not too long.
    Make it as long as necessary to describe the image without making it unnecessarily complicated. One reason for this recommendation is because blind people use screen readers and cannot tell in advance how long the alt text is before they start listening and it is not easy to skip the text like you would if you were looking at it with your eyes. Also, the fediverse is multiligual and people may not listening or reading it their first language.
  2. Don't just repeat the text from the toot.
    If someone is using a screen reader then it will have read the text of the toot out first before reading the contents of the alt text. If you have a toot that describes the image in it then it is okay to have an alt text that says something like "Image as described in the toot".
  3. The information in the alt text box should be for the image description only.
    It is not helpful for a person using a screen reader to find hashtags, web links, emojis or similar here.

A helpful guide on how to write alt texts is here.


Ideally you should include an alt text for every image you post on the fediverse, however, there may be reasons why that is not manageable such as dyslexia or various physical conditions. In these situations people can ask the community to help them add an alt text by adding the hashtag #Alt4Me and someone who sees it will reply to your post with the hashtag #Alt4You and give you an alt text that you can then edit into your original post.

What are the different message types and why are they useful?

You'll notice that different toots and messages have different icons on both the timelines and while typing up a toot. The icons are: a world, a crescent moon, a padlock and an @ icon. If the icon is changed before the message is sent then the visibilty of the message changes. Below is a quick summary of each message type, the icon that represents it and what each message type is useful for.

  • Public message:
    This is often the default message type for new messages and has/uses the world icon. A public message is visible to all and appears on the local timeline, the global timeline and if hashtags are included in the toot text then the toot will appear in the hashtag feeds. It is the most visible of all the toot types.
  • Public message that is a direct reply to someone's message:
    This is still a message with the world icon, but it is sent in a direct reply to a public message. Anyone can see this message, however, it does not appear in the local or global timelines. It does appear in hashtag feeds if any hashtags are included in the toot text.
  • Quiet public message:
    This type of message is activated by selecting the crescent moon icon. It is the most used message type after public messages. It used to be called "unlisted" before its name was changed during a software update. This message can be seen by all but does not appear on the local timeline, the global timeline nor in hashtag feeds. It is extremely useful as it is used for threads and replies and toots that want to use hashtags in an inactive form.
    Threads are made using a public message for the first toot and then all subsequent toots are done using quiet public messages. This is done for two reasons, the local and global timelines and hashtag feeds are not spammed, and that the toot thread will appear in the correct order on the poster's home timeline making it easy to read.
  • Follower only message:
    The follower only message is activated by selecting the padlock icon before sending the message. This type of message is only seen by the poster's followers, it does not appear on local, global or hashtag feeds. It cannot be boosted and is usually used when the poster wants to keep the message just to their followers.
  • Specific people message:
    The specific people message is usually called a DM, a Direct Message. It is used by selecting the @ icon before sending and is only visible to anyone included anywhere in the toot text. Please be aware that these messages are not encrypted, and in the event that the message is officially reported it can be seen by the moderation team/s involved in the report.

Many people say that remembering what message type is which and when to use them is complicated. Feel free to use the message type/s that work best for you, just be mindful that using public all the time may end up spamming timelines and hashtag feeds, which may cause people to mute you or request you use a different message type.

Why is auto-delete useful and how is it set up?

On corporate social media it can be impossible to delete your posts, this is not the case on Mastodon. You get to control when and what gets deleted, unless the server you are on has a protocol that deletes posts after a set amount of time due to server storage systems, in this case you should talk to the admin of the server to find out how long posts are kept for.

  • Why should anyone delete posts regularly?
    Time on a microblogging platform moves fast, today's posts are tomorrow's forgotten news. Posts age quickly and a month is a long time when it comes to social media posts, six or twelve months even more so. With so much to look at everywhere and everyone posting multiple times a day, every day, what is stored on an account accumulates. The idea and reliance on keeping old posts was introduced by corporate social media so they had access to your data whenever they wanted it, the reality is that not many people go back through a couple of months of posts, even if they have not seen the account before.
    Many people find having their posts auto-delete is freeing as it means they can post what they want, almost if it was a verbal conversation with new ideas and random thoughts or creative works automatically evolving with them without past creative accomplishments holding them back. Also, not having an accumulated bank of posts on your account makes it easier for your server admins as the group server capacity can be lower and cheaper. Plus should any scraper scrape the server your account will not have a large bank of details, creative work or data for it to exploit. We take measures on mastoart.social to prevent scrapers, but being on an open public network means there is always a small possibility that a dishonourable party could ignore protocols and standards.
  • How to set up an auto-delete on your profile
    If you are on the web browser, go to Preferences, there you will find the option to activate automatic post deletion and how long to keep posts for. If you are unsure how long to keep posts try setting the time period for longer and shortening it as you feel more comfortable and familiar with the idea of posts deleting automatically. Underneath this is a series of boxes and settings so that you can keep special types of posts, favourite posts, your posts that you bookmark, etc. Again, if unsure, start slowly, check to keep more and you can always return at a later date and be bolder with deletion settings in the future. When you have finished making your choices remember to save changes by clicking on the "Save changes" button in the top right of the page.

Admins

Traditional media portrait of an anthropomorphic feline character with floppy ears, long black hair and yellow eyes.

Sciasm

she/they

I'm a senior UI designer, metalhead, gamer and appreciator of creepy crawlies. I grew up on MySpace and LiveJournal where I was adopted and raised by furries. I love to draw silly creatures and listen to industrial music, doom metal and everything that slaps. I enjoy open world games, indie horror and survival games and love to play pen & paper RPGs.

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Traditional media portrait of an anthropomorphic cat character with pointy ears, glasses and a knowing smile.

Kitty

they/them

I work in training and languages. I’m a geek who prefers to let music and drawings do most of the heavy lifting in conversations. I enjoy doodling, puzzles and walking, I’m also an appreciator of bridges, books, statues and trees. I’m powered by music, mainly metal and darkwave, but any genre is fine as long as it sounds good.

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